A politician worse than Don Shimkus

[porphyry]

Its hard to know whether Christine O'Donnell should be sent to jail or the asylum.

Yesterday she announced that Obama is violating the clause of the Constitution that prohibits the president conferring titles of nobility. He has Czars you see.

The outstanding blog Slactivist had this comment:

The presidency of George W. Bush is not such a distant memory that she can have forgotten his appointment of more than 30 such "czars." Christine O'Donnell has shared platforms with former "drug czar" Bill Bennett and has heard him introduced as such. It beggars belief that she really took this to mean that Bennett had been conferred a "title of nobility" -- that his eldest son would one day inherit the chairmanship of the Office on National Drug Policy, perhaps arranging an alliance though marriage with some daughter of former homeland security "czar" Tom Ridge and uniting their kingdoms.

No one is that stupid. And that leaves only one other possible explanation.

Here you can read about O'Donnell beging treated with all the respect she deserves.

Comments

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

Isn't she the one who claimed that scientists had bred mice with human brains? Maybe she's a product of the reverse of that experiment.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Yes. And she's also the one who rants about chastity outside of marriage while shacked up with her boyfriend in a town-house with her boyfriend/campaign manager paid for out of campaign funds in violation f Federal election law.

She also claims that the Christian civilians during WWII who lied about hiding Jews to the Gestapo committed mortal sin.

But I better stop before I have a stroke.

[filialucis]

I was just about to ask, with reference to the czar thing, whether there was even the remotest chance that she was trying (with singular lack of success) to be ironic or funny. The answer is clearly a resounding No.

[gold-tree.livejournal.com]

I would never have believed that it would be possible for someone to out-Palin Palin, but clearly my standards for political discourse in the U.S. were too high.

[gold-tree.livejournal.com]

Also, I appreciated the inclusion of Count the Count in the accompanying image on the blog.

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

The fact that American politics have degenerated to this state is merely more support for my argument for nuclear war. We need elect folks like this, pack all these people into Washington, encourage Iran to arm, and then elect a warhawk president. Mutliple problems solved.

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

Shit! I'm making terroristic threats on the internets again! That was meant to be a joke! It's American politics, after all!

[benicek.livejournal.com]

I'm currently slowly reading Eric Hobsbawm's history of the 20th century. He makes some good points. One is that, throughout the 20th century, the US was always far better at generating manipulative propaganda (e.g. McCarthyism) than the Soviet Union. Politicians in democracies need propaganda to win elections. Regimes without elections don't. A depressing conclusion.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

What an interesting reading coincidence. I am reading Paul Linebarger's science fiction right now (written under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith), and also reading Linebarger's classic text, Psychological Warfare. That's basically his point, too - the English and the British were *masterful* at propaganda, especially when compared to the clumsy German and Japanese efforts. Further, many of the American propagandists in the OSS went on to Madison Avenue after WW II.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

Leonard Cohen is going through my head right now:

"I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean /
I love the country but I can't stand the scene..."

[postconditional.livejournal.com]

This extremism has taken on a life of its own. I thought the Neo-Cons were bad, but this new form of extremism is extreme even for extremists.

If the polls hold come election time, our law-makers will be arguing over the constitutionality of every bill proposed and they are going to be debating against an originalist's point of view. That's the Constitution, sans Amendments or any laws passed since. I watched as Bush drove through the Bill of Rights of the first ten amendments. I know that they want to repeal the 14th and 17th. (Some conservatives want to repeal the 19th, as well.)

This is just one facet of the changes that this new conservatism will bring. More of them are going to get elected because we will predictably vote against the party in power in a recession. The resulting policies are going to turn us into an leaking oil tanker full of oil and broken steering. It's going to get messy, and it's not going to get cleaned up in our lifetimes.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

What is going on in this country? It's terrifying.

[postconditional.livejournal.com]

There are several ideological wars going on at once. I'm just not sure if all of them realize it.

Let me see if I can recap.

Politicians and the religious right both felt targeted by the Red Scare in the 50's, but neither seemed to be as politically active at the time. They failed to see that everything wasn't perfect about the 50's. The 60's took them by surprise, and they couldn't understand why. It scared them.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, recursively. The counter-counter-culture future Neo-cons got their toe-hold in the Nixon administration (69-74). There's a whole history behind the ideology there; I'd start by looking at Rumsfeld and Cheney.

The religious right also started to feel their power in the 70's, and they thought that they had their ally in Carter. Carter wasn't hard-lined enough, but proto-Neo-Con Reagan was more agreeable. This is where the religious right really got into bed with a Republican party that was changing dramatically. As political entities, they helped to create each other, but they are not one. Neo-Cons see religion as a tool to manipulate. (Tea Partiers believe in it.)

Things stalled in the 90's. I'll only briefly mention the height of Neo-Con power during the G.W.Bush administration. We all know how we finally kicked them to the curb in the 2008.

Once again, like the 60's, they didn't understand why. They thought it was because they weren't true to their roots of fiscal responsibility. They were also afraid of extinction.

The 08 election got rid of a lot of Republican moderates who were unfortunate to run on a very unpopular party ticket. Thing changed with more conservative Neo-Cons in power. The moderates became marginalized. The race was on to become more conservative than conservative.

Fearing extinction, the gloves came off. Call out every Democrat initiative as evil. Get them to compromise and weaken their proposals. Point out how the comprises are bad and then point it out again when the weakened compromise isn't strong enough. Filibuster and huff and bluster and use it to rally the conservative base. (For example, the health care bill was _very_ similar to one that the Republicans themselves had proposed in the mid-90's.)

All of this talk of recession and spending has got people scared. This is how the Tea Party got its start. The Neo-Cons fed them and nurtured them because it has worked well for them in past elections. Now it's a fire out of control.

There's a lot of history behind why religion + anti-regulation + pre-emptive-strikes + anti-social-programs + anti-environment got together. Some of it comes from Ayn Rand wanting everyone to become more like murderous sociopaths. Some of it comes from associating communists with hippies and environmentalism and social-programs. Some of it is greed, or fear, or intolerance, or the desire to spread our perfect way of life.

[postconditional.livejournal.com]

...But at the heart of all religious fundamentalist extremist conservatism is the fear of change. We're not independent families with 2.6 children. Not all of us attends a traditional Christian church service on Sunday. Witch-craft is openly practiced. There's a lot of sex and violence on TV and worse, video games. If you believe the news, we are falling apart as a society. (Violent crimes have been on a downward trend since possibly the 1980's.) There are foreign religions and ideas that are out to get us and must be stopped.

To this, i reply:

"The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents,
every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching." - Assyrian Tablet, circa some 2800 B.C.

[postconditional.livejournal.com]

Sigh, I'm still rambling...

It all goes back further than this... to the 95 Thesis, the resulting 30 Year's War, the rationalist back-lash against emotional reactions (and emotional religion), the resulting in-compassionate number-crunching (eventually business) analysis, the counter-back-lash that resulted in separate Marxism, romanticism, and evangelical movements (Search: Great Awakenings in America). The cause and effect gets complicated, but I can't recall when any of those forces were ever so polarized (it seems).